Editorial: Evaluations, not embarrassments

Updated 8:00 pm, Thursday, June 21, 2012

THE ISSUE:

Parents will be told their children's teacher's evaluation scores and ratings.

THE STAKES:

A tool to manage and develop teachers could be used to pillory them.

It's extraordinarily rare for us to argue against public access to information. Part of a newspaper's job, after all, is to make sure citizens have access to what they need to know to make informed decisions in our democracy. But making teacher performance evaluations available to the public — even in a limited way — is bad policy.

Giving parents access to teacher evaluations would mark an unprecedented exposure of employee records. It could subject teachers to malicious humiliation and undermine the evaluations' very purpose.

It's almost certainly too late to stop Gov. Andrew Cuomo's self-described "compromise" bill on teacher evaluations that was hurriedly passed Thursday by lawmakers anxious to end the session and go home. But even if it's inevitable that this becomes law, we can't help offering some belated words of warning.

Let's remember why New York is implementing evaluations. Tenure and other protections make it costly and time consuming to fire bad teachers. Disciplinary action can take years. To bring more accountability to the system, a new law requires New York teachers to be evaluated on such factors as classroom performance and how their students do on standardized tests. Teachers will receive an annual rating of highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective. Those with ineffective ratings will have a year to improve before a school may begin to remove them.

As in any workplace, schools can productively use these evaluations as a tool to identify areas for improvement. And, yes, the evaluations can be used to weed out bad teachers.

But a wrinkle in this system developed some months ago when a court ruled that these evaluations are public information, like most government documents.

Imagine how that could play out: Tabloid headlines like, "Worst teachers of the year." Websites devoted to denigrating teachers rated ineffective, maybe even those rated developing.

That's not so bad, you think?

This is a state, remember, that by law conceals information on police misconduct and doctor incompetence under the notion that disclosure would make their jobs harder. Yet it would be OK to publicize that a teacher is in need of improvement, and then throw that teacher into a class of adolescents and expect him or her to command respect? To deal with parents out to blame someone for their child's bad grades?

Public disclosure risks undermining the evaluation system's integrity, should some principals decide that bad ratings reflect poorly on them and hand out "effective" ratings as a matter of course. Or might a principal use a bad rating to embarrass a teacher he or she doesn't like?

Imagine how many capable, good-hearted young people would think twice about entering a profession where such ratings will be subject to public commentary and ridicule.

Mr. Cuomo's answer was a bill requiring statistical, anonymous disclosure of teacher ratings, but also allowing parents to get rating information by name on their child's teachers. In an age of virtually instant digital dissemination of information, we see no real protection here. For small districts, where even anonymous data can identify people, the bill passes the ball to the State Education Department to figure out how to preserve privacy.

We recognize that many, including the teachers' union, call this an acceptable compromise. It may turn out to be. If not, how many humiliations, how may breakdowns of the system, will the governor and lawmakers accept before they fix it?

The public certainly should be able to get meaningful information, such as aggregate numbers of teachers with various ratings, how many improve or fail to do so, and how many are dismissed for failure to meet standards. This bill, however, threatens to turn what could be a thoughtful, effective tool for improving schools and teachers into a 21st century scarlet letter.